Observability Architect - 12 Month FTC

• Observability Architect
• 12 Month FTC

About You

• You care deeply about producing high-quality work that delivers real value
• You're comfortable navigating ambiguity and solving complex problems collaboratively
• You bring strong expertise in your craft, alongside a willingness to keep learning
• You communicate clearly and build trust quickly with clients and teammates
• You're pragmatic, adaptable and outcome-focused
• You enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others grow
• You value low-ego collaboration and enjoy working as part of multidisciplinary teams
• Role Objective

Lead the assessment, design, and optimisation of the observability strategy for the co‑location migration programme.

Ensure logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and operational dashboards provide comprehensive visibility across the new infrastructure and application estate, enabling the successful migration of the tightly‑coupled monolithic platform with minimal operational risk.

Identify gaps in the existing observability capability and recommend enhancements to tooling, processes, and architecture where required.

Key Responsibilities

• Observability Assessment & Strategy
• Review the current observability architecture across infrastructure, networks, middleware, databases, and applications.
• Assess existing logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and monitoring capabilities to determine readiness for the co‑location migration.
• Develop an observability strategy that supports both migration activities and long‑term operational support.
• Recommend enhancements or platform uplifts where current tooling does not provide sufficient visibility or resilience.
• Baseline Performance Analysis
• Analyse telemetry, monitoring data, dashboards, and operational trends from completed migration waves.
• Establish performance baselines for compute, storage, networking, application response times, and transaction throughput.
• Identify recurring operational issues and use historical insights to improve migration readiness.
• Define measurable service health indicators to compare pre‑ and post‑migration performance.
• Monolithic Application Monitoring
• Design comprehensive monitoring for the tightly‑coupled monolithic application estate, with particular emphasis on latency‑sensitive interdependencies.
• Create real‑time dashboards that provide operational visibility across infrastructure, middleware, databases, messaging, and application components.
• Ensure end‑to‑end transaction tracing is available to rapidly identify bottlenecks and service degradation.
• Validate monitoring coverage prior to each migration wave.
• Logging & Trace Management
• Review and standardise centralised logging across all migrated environments.
• Ensure consistent log formats, metadata, correlation IDs, and traceability across systems.
• Validate log ingestion, retention policies, indexing, and search performance.
• Ensure operational teams can rapidly investigate incidents using correlated logs and distributed traces.
• Alerting & Operational Readiness
• Review and optimise alert thresholds to minimise both missed events and unnecessary alert noise.
• Implement intelligent alerting aligned to business services and critical customer journeys.
• Define migration‑specific alerting for infrastructure failures, application degradation, latency increases, replication issues, and capacity constraints.
• Support operational readiness activities including rehearsals and production cutover monitoring.
• Compliance & Audit
• Ensure observability solutions meet financial services regulatory requirements for auditability, log retention, security, and data governance.
• Validate access controls and security monitoring for observability platforms.
• Support evidence gathering for internal governance, audit, and regulatory reviews.
• Platform Improvement
• Evaluate the suitability of existing observability platforms and recommend improvements where required.
• Assess opportunities to improve automation, anomaly detection, service health monitoring, and predictive alerting.
• Define standards and best practices for observability across future migration phases.
• Stakeholder Collaboration
• Work closely with Infrastructure Architects, Application Architects, Platform Engineering, Security, Operations, and Migration teams.
• Provide technical guidance during migration planning, testing, dress rehearsals, and production cutovers.
• Produce architecture documentation, monitoring standards, operational runbooks, and knowledge transfer materials.
• Required Skills & Experience
• Extensive experience designing enterprise observability solutions within large‑scale infrastructure or data centre migration programmes.
• Strong knowledge of metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and application performance monitoring (APM).
• Experience monitoring latency‑sensitive, business‑critical enterprise applications.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, storage, databases, and middleware monitoring.
• Experience implementing centralised logging and observability best practices.
• Knowledge of financial services operational resilience, audit, and regulatory requirements.
• Ability to analyse complex operational telemetry and identify performance bottlenecks.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

Benefits

• 25 days bookable holiday + flexible Bank Holidays
• Pension: 6% of salary paid by AND Digital with a further 2% paid by you (can be increased by choice).
• Aviva healthcare cover (including pre‑existing condition cover) for you.
• Flexibenefit: £1000 assigned to you via our benefits portal to select or upgrade the benefits that suit you the most. Any unused allowance from the £1000 can be taken as cash.
• Life Assurance.
• Income Protection.
• Eye test + first pair of glasses.
• Parental Benefits: Generous Enhanced Maternity and Enhanced Partner (Paternity) Leave.
• Equal Opportunities Statement

Diversity and inclusion are hugely important to us, and we're committed to providing equal opportunities for all.

We're actively recruiting for a diverse and inclusive workforce so want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel safe and empowered to let us know if you need any adjustments to be made to your application or interview process, so please speak to our recruitment team.

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